<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Chosen by secretagentfan</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27014317">Chosen</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/secretagentfan/pseuds/secretagentfan'>secretagentfan</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Tales of Symphonia</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Colette &amp; Everyone, Family, Gen, Lloyd/Sheena if you squint, Post-Canon, Zelos/Colette if you squint</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-07 02:21:55</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,515</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27014317</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/secretagentfan/pseuds/secretagentfan</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-canon / Lloyd and Sheena ending / Colette-centric / friend families</p><p>Colette discovers that being alive after everything is both lonely and wonderful.</p><p>She writes a lot of letters.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Colette Brunel &amp; Lloyd Irving, Colette Brunel &amp; Lloyd Irving &amp; Genis Sage, Colette Brunel &amp; Zelos Wilder</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Chosen</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This is an OLD fic that I wrote for theguineapig3 for Tales Secret Santa in 2017 BUT HEY, I still like it, and I want it archived. SO ENJOY all who stumble in here...</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>      Colette wrote, on average, about eight letters every three days.</p><p>      Genis and Raine replied the most often. Genis's letters were armed with sharp complaints and insightful advice in equal measure; Raine's with a multitude of ideas centering around magitechnology that made Colette feel like a ultra-important sounding board for the future of man. Colette didn’t always understand their letters, but she treasured them all the same.</p><p>      Lloyd and Sheena’s letters, more often then not, arrived at the same time. Lloyd’s were messy and quickly scrawled, but with excessive attention to detail and the occasional souvenir. The mail carrier told her to please ask him to stop sending plants in the mail as the distance was too far and the plants wilted miserably, but Sheena’s last letter told her it was okay for her to be more selfish, and if Lloyd wanted to send her plants, Colette wanted to receive every single wilted, rotten bit.</p><p>      Regal’s letters were formal and eloquent like the man himself. Secretly, Colette wondered if he spent a lot of time writing while he was locked away. How else would he know how to effortlessly use the word “dulcet” in a simple letter about cake? Presea’s, on the other hand, were closer to stream-of-consciousness observations, descriptions of things she’d seen while traveling, things that stood out to her and she thought Colette would enjoy.</p><p>      Zelos was always the last to reply, but his letters were the funniest. Switching from formal and professional language to exceptionally graphic gossip seemed to be a skill of his left untapped during their journey, and Colette treasured every moment with his words.</p><p>      She started collecting stickers and wax, grew an affinity for certain stationary, and enjoyed mentally color-coding her friends. Lloyd, for example, was usually the recipient of letters on simple, unpatterned red or brown paper, but Colette also found forest green fit him as well. Her friends were all like that, really; on the surface one or two colors, but inside they were a whole beautiful array of patterns and papers that kept Colette shopping for hours.</p><p>      Many afternoons were lost standing in a marketplace mulling over paper after paper, and thinking of her friends. It was fun. It made missing them a lot easier.</p><p>      She knew everyone would go their separate ways, but it didn’t make it any better when it actually happened. Everyone had places to be: Lloyd and Sheena picking up exspheres, Presea traveling the united world— making up for lost time. Genis finishing school, Raine teaching, Regal running his company, even Zelos it seemed was up to his ears in work, looking after Seles and trying to reform the Church. Colette had done her share of work with the Church as well. Important work, as frankly all work in that department was a step in a better direction with nowhere to go but up.</p><p>      She was happy. It was nice to be alive, even if she felt a little lost. Colette never expected to see age seventeen, and now she had the honor of being confused about where her life was <em>going</em>. It was a bittersweet luxury she never expected to have.</p><p>      Colette’s most recent purchase was a set of sky blue papers, something that she would have normally organized to Genis’s pile—but the addition of a small illustration of a snow bunny in the bottom left corner kept her from separating it. Snow bunnies, Colette decided, were for everyone.</p><p>      She wrote Genis’s letter first, then Sheena’s, then Zelos’s, then spilled the ink over Zelos’s letter, threw it out, wrote a newer better one, failed to realize she still had ink all over her hands, left handprints all over her desk, stood to wash off, tripped, knocked over her bookshelf which in turn shattered a piggy bank she didn’t know she had which turned out to contain a sizable amount of gald; left the gald and ink and books on the floor, she’d just deal with all of this later, and finished up Presea, Regal and Lloyd’s letters.</p><p>      Her eighth letter was variable. Sometimes she wrote to Dirk, or Neil, or Frank and Phaidra. Today she was writing to Chocolat, when there was a knock at her door. </p><p>      She stood and tried to subtly shove some of the books that had flown from her shelf under her bed, but her “cleaning” was ineffective at best.</p><p><em>      Oh well,</em> Colette thought, as she puttered over to the door, sticking her ink-covered hands into her sleeves so as to not stain the knob when she turned it.</p><p>      The ensuing “<em>SURPRISE</em>!” quickly trailed into complete chaos, as seven friends attempted to figure out what the hell happened with as much shouting, frantic energy, and physical contact as possible.</p><p>      “Everyone just shut up and give her a chance to speak!” Sheena ordered, and everyone went mercifully silent.</p><p>      Colette opened her mouth when Lloyd abruptly, but not without care, grabbed a clump of her hair. It was a dull blackish-green color.</p><p><em>      Oh,</em> she thought<em>. The ink must be on more than just my hands.</em></p><p>      “Are you bleeding!?” he asked, voice high.</p><p>      Presea spoke up, standing somewhere behind him, pink pigtails bobbing at the force of her head shake. “It is black therefore it is not blood. I suspect it is ink of some kind.”</p><p>      “And who bleeds from the tips of their hair?” Genis added, not even trying to hide how annoyed he was.  </p><p>      “We’ve seen stranger things, Genis,” Lloyd grumbled, eyes flicking to Colette in askance, confident in his theory.</p><p>      Regal cleared his throat. “I believe we were trying to give her some room to speak.”</p><p>      “Yeah Lloyd, give her some space!” Zelos echoed, stepping into Colette’s home and shifting closer to her. He paused, picking up one of the gold pieces littering the floor. “Is this gald? Why is there gald here?”</p><p>      Raine’s glare could melt metal. “We will receive an answer when we decide to stop interrupting her, but from the looks of it she knocked over some ink and the bookshelf.”</p><p>      “But you interrupted her that time—“ Lloyd pointed out and Sheena put a hand on his shoulder, as Genis frantically shook his head. He straightened up. “Sorry, Colette. Go on.”</p><p>      Fourteen pairs of eyes met Colette’s with a force intimidating enough to take down an army, but Colette just felt <em>complete</em>. She missed this. She missed this so much.</p><p>      “Raine’s right,” Colette said, illustrating her point with her hands. “I was writing letters, and I spilled the ink and I fell, and the bookshelf fell too, that’s all! It’s okay though, I didn’t know I had this much gald!”</p><p>      Everyone in the room sighed. Colette laughed.</p><p>      “Sorry! It’s really good to see all of you,” she found herself saying to clear the silence. “But why are you here?”</p><p>      Lloyd nodded, sounding a little proud. “Weirdly, it was Zelos’s idea.”</p><p>      “Wait, what? I thought this was your idea?” Sheena said, Lloyd shook his head.</p><p>      “Nope, Zelos said he was going to be around, and since we don’t really have a holiday to meet up for right now, and Colette’s the only one of us who’s not constantly traveling, we arranged to make her the meeting place.”</p><p>      Genis frowned, glancing between Zelos and Lloyd, pointedly not buying it. “It seems like a Lloyd idea, that’s for sure.”</p><p>      Zelos made an affronted noise, swinging an arm around Colette’s shoulders. “Why does everyone seem to think that Lloyd is the only one with good ideas?”</p><p>      “You’re the only one who has ulterior motives,” Sheena grunted, staring at his arm, and Colette squeezed it to show that the contact wasn’t a problem, only remembering the ink after it stained his clothes. Luckily, Zelos didn’t seem to notice.</p><p>      “I’m really happy! Thank you!” Colette said, smiling so wide she could hear it in her own voice.</p><p>      “Anything for our Colette right?” Zelos grinned, and then noticed the stain on his sleeve and made a face somewhere between disgust, alarm, and dull acceptance.</p><p>      Presea, having wandered to Colette’s desk, spoke up, quiet voice sounding over everyone else’s laughter. “I like…this paper.”</p><p>      “A Flanoir snow bunny. They’re supposed to be good luck.” Regal said, picking up his letter. “It is quite cute.”</p><p>      Colette grinned, and abruptly Lloyd was at her desk too, checking out his. “Aw man!” he announced, holding the letter up and swinging it enthusiastically.  “I should have brought a letter for you too.”</p><p>      Colette nodded. “That would have been really cool, Lloyd!”</p><p>      "What’s the point of bringing a letter if you’re already here?” Genis sighed, holding his letter. He was smiling slightly.</p><p>      “Hey, why do I get the one with handprints?” Zelos whined as Sheena nodded approvingly.</p><p>      A comfortable silence overtook the house, as everyone sat down, leaned, or stood and gave their complete attention to their letter. It was a little embarrassing to see it up close, the focus every one of her friends gave, the quiet nods and thoughtful hums. Colette felt, in that moment something squirming and joyful swimming through her veins.</p><p>      She felt silly, suddenly, for worrying about the distance between them.</p>
  </div></div>
</body>
</html>